Posts Tagged ‘sos sosowski’

McPixel is a wonderful little jolt of a game, as much an excuse for silly things to happen as it is a puzzle game. McPixeleer Sos Sosowski’s latest game skips straight to the silliness, with none of that slouching nonsense. Stomp It Up is made to be played on a dance mat. Oh sure, but can play on keyboard if you don’t have one on hand, but tapping away won’t be nearly the same as jumping and stomping along to the enervating and highly irritating soundtrack.

McPixel has exploded onto Steam and is the first game to reach Valve’s storefront through the Greenlight process. There’s a feature about the indies and Steam coming later, courtesy of Nathan who has been visiting Fantastic Arcade where he was witness to a Valve panel all about Greenlight. I didn’t go to Fantastic Arcade but I did wake up at 7.30 this morning, endure the difficult commute from my bed to my computer and put on my Serious Journalist Hat. Primed and ready, I sent a list of very important and serious questions to Sos Sosowski about being the Armstrong of indies: the first man on Greenlight.

If you’re a frequent RPS reader (or an infrequent RPS reader with uncannily good timing), the image on the front page of ubiquitous, recently-banned-in-the-UK-under-extremely-dubious-circumstances torrenting site The Pirate Bay might strike you as a bit familiar. If not, you may have still been able to guess that it heralds from Sos Sosowski’s McPixel because, well, the first four words on the page will tell you all of that. This, however, is the first time a game has ever been featured as part of Pirate Bay’s “Promo Bay” program – wherein, a creator gets to leverage the site’s incredible reach for exposure. But how’d this come about? And what does it say about the ever-evolving role of piracy in the gaming industry? Plus, given that many file swaps on Pirate Bay are technically illegal, does anyone really deserve a pat on the back in this situation? I spoke with both McPixel’s Sos and an organizer from The Pirate Bay to find out more.

Remember McPixel? You first met the bizarro rapid-fire point-and-click adventure when it was naught but a bouncing baby demo. It may have vomited on your shirt. It, er, finds those sorts of things funny. But now McPixel’s all grown up and available for purchase, so naturally, its humorous sensibilities have matured. A little. OK, so it’s still amazingly low-brow in places (for instance, McPixel’s go-to means of attempting to save the world is generally a casual kick to the groin) but replaying 20-second, constantly exploding scenarios for hidden gags yields some gleefully unexpected results. Witness the mesmerizing (and, for some reason, partially live-action) madness in a new trailer after the break.

While watching people code is unlikely to be an event at this year’s 2012th London Olympathon, it has become more popular than I ever imagined it would. Admittedly, I imagined it would be marginally less popular than drinking your own eyeballs through a crazy straw so the fact that it’s an activity of choice for anybody is something of a surprise to me. You may remember the Indie Buskers, a gaggle of hardboiled indie types who offered up their coding expertise online, to an audience occasionally yelling requests. The results are now available. Read on to find out what dark ballads were in demand.